Sioux Falls Free Thinkers endorse The Bombing of Germany forshowing that the US military took part in the mass murderof the civilian population of Germany against theexpress wishes of the US president.

On September 1, 1939 - the first day of World War II in Europe - President Franklin D. Roosevelt appealed to the warring nations to "under no circumstances undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations." Just six years later, British and American Allied forces had carried out a bombing campaign of unprecedented might over Germany's cities, claiming the lives of nearly half a million civilians. The Bombing of Germany examines the defining moments of the offensive that led the U.S. across a moral divide. Weaving together interviews with WWII pilots and historians, and stunning archival footage of the bombing and its aftermath, this American Experience film is a haunting reminder of the dilemma imposed by war's civilian casualties.

2-5-16 Where WWII bombs still lie in waitWhere WWII bombs still lie in waitSeventy years after World War II, thousands of undetonated U.S. bombs are still buried under German towns and cities. Writer Adam Higginbotham follows the race to defuse them—before it’s too late. Between 1940 and 1945, U.S. and British air forces dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Europe, half of them on Germany. By the time the Nazi government surrendered, in May 1945, the industrial infrastructure of the Third Reich—railheads, arms factories, and oil refineries—had been crippled, and dozens of cities across Germany had been reduced to moonscapes of cinder and ash. Yet as many as 10 percent of the bombs dropped by Allied aircraft had failed to explode, and as East and West Germany rose from the ruins of the Reich, thousands of tons of unexploded airborne ordnance lay beneath them. In both East and West, responsibility for defusing these bombs—and for removing the innumerable hand grenades, bullets, and mortar and artillery shells left behind—fell to police bomb-disposal technicians and firefighters, the KMBD. Even now, 70 years later, more than 2,000 tons of unexploded munitions are uncovered on German soil every year. Before any construction project begins in Germany, the ground must be certified as cleared of unexploded ordnance. German bomb-disposal squads are among the busiest in the world. Eleven bomb technicians have been killed in Germany since 2000, including three in 2010 who died in a single explosion while trying to defuse a 1,000-pound bomb on the site of a popular flea market in Göttingen.

Total Page Views

The Bombing of Germany

Sioux Falls Free Thinkers endorse The Bombing of Germany forshowing that the US military took part in the mass murderof the civilian population of Germany against theexpress wishes of the US president.